Opposition to Soviet rule has deep roots and traditions in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Modern dissentism, however, is a response to Soviet rule different from what we call opposition in the West. In the Baltic republics it must be dated from 1968, the watershed year in the rise of human rights movement in the Soviet Union. In Estonia and Latvia, dissident activity was galvanized to life primarily by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia which provoked vocal criticism. In Lithuania, reaction to Czechoslovakia's occupation coincided with the growing concern that an increasingly severe implementation of prohibitive anti-religious legislation will choke off the existence of the Catholic church. Concern for religious rights served as the primary catalyst for the reborn dissent movement in Lithuania.

The study of ethnic nationalism in the Caucasus is problematic. This situation arises not so much from the extreme ethnic and cultural diversity of this region, but more from the same methodological obstacles and problems encountered when studying ethnic nationalism anywhere in the USSR. Before discussing ethnic nationalism in the Caucasus, then, a brief treatment of some of these problems is presented. It is hoped that this format will make this paper more valuable to those interested in the nationality situation in the Soviet Union in general.

At the end of 1928 Matvyi Iavorskyi, head of historical studies in the Ukrainian Institute of Marxism-Leninism and hitherto considered a sort of court historian of Ukrainian communism, was attacked for allegedly committing “nationalistic deviations” in interpreting Ukrainian history. Iavorskyi was in no sense a “dissident” like Oleksander Shumskyi or Mykola Khvylovyi; he never, so far as is known, questioned the official Party line. Rather, he was a close associate of Mykola Skrypnyk, the political strongman of the Soviet Ukrainian regime, and the hue and cry raised against “Iavorskyism” in historial scholarship was actually an indirect attack upon Skrypnyk. It had the distinction of being the first such attack; it would not be the last.

Many writers, among them Alexis de Toqueville, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Jose Ortega y Gasset and, more recently, Jacques Ellul, have predicted that as a result of technological and political development, the mass societies in which we now live will be fully transformed into distopian regimes by the end of this century. They foresaw the emergence of vast, regimented systems in which people would live lonely, dehumanized lives under the tutelage of all-providing and all-pervading hierarchies made up of functionaries and intellectuals, pitifully subservient to the ruling elite.

Karol Cardinal Wojtyla's encounters with Marxism-Leninism, the official ideology of the Polish state run by the Communist party, have taken place on two levels: theoretical-philosophical and political-practical. As a person living in the country ruled by the Marxist-Leninists, the Cardinal had to be concerned with the reality of his own situation as well as the power structure of the Party-state. As a priest he had to deal with the concept of alienation that is at the center of Marxist anthropology, realizing that the fundamental precondition for abolition of alienation is not abundance of material goods, but an internal improvement of people. As a philosopher Wojtyla had to cope with Marxist concepts of man, nature, society, economics and culture. A neo-Thomist scholar, the present pope believes in human liberty and rejects deterministic philosophies such as Marxism.

The Yugoslav critique of Stalinism and the concomitant elaboration of the Titoist model of self-managing socialism continue to bewilder observers East and West, as well as the Yugoslavs themselves. Thus, until recently, Chinese communist criticism that Yugoslavia had sold out to the West and become its Trojan Horse in the communist world was neatly balanced by those Western critiques which see in Titoism a communist Trojan Horse to penetrate Western defenses. Some wonder whether Yugoslavia is really a self-managing democracy or a single-party dictatorship. Others ask themselves whether Yugoslavia's decentralized economy is capitalist or socialist. Many fear for Yugoslavia's territorial integrity and national independence, particularly since Tito's death on May 4, 1980.